ABSTRACT
The new concept of security, contrasted with the traditional focus on state security, is aimed at ensuring protection of the people. The Human Security Commission's focus was on the empowerment of people, which could help prepare them against severe present and future threats, both natural and societal. The focus on human security is to ensure that adequate attention is given to addressing the real sources of insecurity from which so many people all over the world suffer. Nuclear weapons are unquestionably a main source of the people's insecurity. And weapons of mass destruction—nuclear, chemical, and biological—also constitute traditional threats to state security. Equally important, many security experts have argued that nuclear weapons have minimal utility as instruments of war and that their continued possession has a negative effect on the maintenance of regional and global security. The Union of Concerned Scientists reiterated in August 2007 that "[n]uclear weapons remain the gravest and most immediate threat to human civilization".
